GAMBIT (1966)

Amid a flurry of comic-tinged mid-‘60s heist capers (PINK PANTHER: laughs; TOPKAPI: suspense; HOW TO STEAL A MILLION: chic; HOT MILLIONS: middle-class got’cha; THOMAS CROWN AFFAIR: sangfroid), GAMBIT was the one that passed for sophisticated Hollywood fun. Still does. Michael Caine, fresh off his ALFIE breakthrough, is the man with the scam; a scam that needs Shirley MacLaine’s Hong Kong dance girl to work since she’s a ringer for art collector Herbert Lom’s late wife. And the big gimmick our poster begs us not to reveal? Reels two & three show the caper going off without a hitch, but only in Caine’s imagination. Once the action starts up for real, nothing goes quite as planned.* And if this non-linear fake-out no longer startles, it does set up a template to bust up before it’s cobbled back into place by Caine & MacLaine, thinking on their feet & turning into an improbable couple. Director Ronald Neame, like Caine in his Hollywood debut, doesn’t drop a stitch pulling the seams together, working exceptionally well with journeyman lenser Clifford Stine to get an exotic location feel. (No small feat at Universal Studios in ‘66.) And from a bad period for MacLaine, when her kooky persona had lost dewy freshness and become self-conscious, she refuses to push, leading with smarts & natural charm. Something that must have rubbed off since everyone brings elegance & restraint to their comically heightened characterizations. And wrapped with a satisfying final twist in scripter Alvin Sargent’s feature debut.

DOUBLE-BILL: A Coen Brothers rethink (GAMBIT/’12, not seen here) flopped miserably. *Instead, see Preston Sturges create the imagined perfect run-thru gimmick in UNFAITHFULLY YOURS/’48. (Poorly remade in 1984.) OR: Caine’s pleasing return to the genre in the otherwise mediocre FLAWLESS/’07.